Is Instagram Ruining Art? One Museum Is Trying 'Photo Free' Hours

Featured on time.com

“This one is going to be tough,” a woman said on Wednesday evening, with her phone clutched to her heart like a missionary holding a Bible.

She was at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and there was a stunning bouquet of flowers ten feet away. But in order to photograph them, she first had to get through a crowd of other museum-goers all jostling for elbow room to do the same thing. Some people couldn’t move in the crowded gallery. Others bumped into fellow patrons with bags and arms as they angled for a shot. “You can’t even see anything,” one museum-goer at the back of the pack complained.

The cause of this frenzy was Bouquets to Art, an exhibition that has become one of the de Young’s most popular annual events. For the 34th year, florists have been asked to create bouquets that respond to particular pieces of art on display, ranging from ancient carvings to contemporary sculptures. A tower of baby’s breath imitates a frothy waterfall in a nearby painting by Gustav Grunewald. Red flamingo flowers and neon-blue sticks echo a surreal portrait of a woman by Salvador Dali. It’s entrancing and also extremely Instagrammable, to the point that it has become a problem.

As some people have started to document their every experience with smartphones, other people have started to accuse them of ruining things. This includes weddings, concerts and sidewalks, as well as Bouquets to Art. In recent years, the de Young received more than a thousand complaints from people who had flocked to the “annual floral takeover,” saying that the rabid photo-taking, and general cell phone usage, had tainted their experience.

It’s an issue that institutions of fine art around the world are facing, as the desire to take photographs becomes a huge draw for museums as well as something that upsets some of their patrons. And so the de Young has responded with a kind of compromise: carving out “photo free” hours during the exhibition’s six-day span from March 13 to March 18 (a short run due to flowers’ perishable nature).

Some people “want to maintain that reverence in a museum, and we need to be respectful of that,” said Linda Butler, the de Young’s head of marketing, communications and visitor experience.

On Wednesday, these hours were not in effect, and it’s easy to rag on the behavior that ensued (even though most smartphone users find themselves guilty of the same sins at times, this author included). As thousands of people squeezed into galleries to see the flowers at their freshest, bottlenecks were common. Many visitors essentially waited in disorganized lines to snap pics of pretty pairings. People in wheelchairs had to wait for breaks in the hubbub to get a glimpse at all. The rare patron even got distracted enough to accidentally lean into the artwork on the walls.

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